What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “I know that place,” she said. “Stupid farang Buddha people. You owe me three hundred baht for what I paid for the van and the food that day. All for nothing.”

  He put all the money he had left into her hand, made a deep wai, and left her staring.

  * * *

  “Would you like to work with the glass?” said Gerhard when he returned. As if their conversation a week before had not been interrupted. “Or perhaps the vegetable garden?”

  Nitnoy thought of the elephant being twitched out of a ball of glass, then remembered the honey he’d stolen, the lingering, mysterious flavor.

  “Where are the bees?” he said.

  * * *

  He was stung a lot.

  “You move too quickly,” said Gerhard. “You have to move with awareness. You have to move with love.” Love: that seemed a ridiculous word to use about insects.

  Gerhard himself moved almost in slow motion when managing the hives, placing each frame carefully, allowing the bees to escape, never squashing one. At harvest time, he showed Nitnoy how to fit a harvest insert below what he called the super, the top level of the hive that held the frames of honeycomb. The harvest insert had a maze on its underside, a complicated set of channels around a central hole. Gerhard explained that while the hole permitted the bees’ easy exit from the super, the maze baffled their return. The harvest insert was left in place for a few days; then they used the smoke to calm the bees and drive them into the lower hive to feed.

  They lifted the frames out above the dozing feeding bees, took them one at a time to the honey hut. Gerhard heated a knife blade by running a lighter up and down the metal, then sliced across the honeycomb, removing the caps from the wax cells. He held the frame over the collecting drum, and when the flow of golden honey had stopped, set the frame outside on a table. “For the bees to clean,” said Gerhard. They came as if summoned and crawled for hours over the frame in an industrious undulating mat of gold and black, collecting the remaining honey traces and leaving the wax intact. The honeyless frames were put back into the super and the maze insert was removed, so the bees could fill the cells with new honey and seal them with new wax caps, and it all could begin again.

  Between harvests there was plenty to do. They inspected the hives regularly, looking for hive beetles or the stringy signs of disease. They also took care of the flowers. To tend to the bees, you must tend to the flowers, said Gerhard. A lot of flowers were needed to entice the bees to stay on the property. Pesticide use was rampant in the rest of the city, and a bee who wandered could bring poison back to the hive.

  “All this land is actually for the bees,” said Gerhard, waving his hand to indicate the longan bushes, the trees, the flowering shrubs.

  There were other crafts in the compound apart from glassblowing and honey; over time, annoyed at being stung so often, Nitnoy tried all of them. He made flower garlands to sell at the temples, but his fingers couldn’t do the fine work as well as the patient women who demonstrated for him. He enjoyed the pottery at first, how the cylinder rose like magic between his circled hands, but one wobble and it went out of shape, the mouth a dented ellipse, the whole thing collapsing sideways. At the end of two days, he scraped the clay back into the slurry and went back to the bees.

  At first, he was angry at the bees for stinging him, the pointlessness of their reflex suicides annoying him as much as the painful welts. As he grew more experienced and was stung less he felt superior to them, seeing them as slaves. Then he began to pity them for the futility of their lives, building up stores that were robbed again and again. Finally he began to love them, as their god who cared for them, who took from them for reasons they couldn’t comprehend. He strove to be a good deity, to ensure that they didn’t suffer unduly, not a leg or a wing crushed. He learned to go slowly, to walk between heartbeats as Gerhard said, to focus on just the matter at hand, not looking behind at what had gone before, or ahead to what was to come. Harm to the bees felt like harm to himself. It was love unrequited, love that served no purpose. Which was, after all, love.

  * * *

  “The problem of the bee in the bottle,” commented Gerhard with the air of telling a joke, one day when Nitnoy was coaxing a bee out of a jar and back to the hive. He saw that Nitnoy did not understand the reference. “Hm. I shall get you some books.” He took the jar from Nitnoy, turned it right side up. “The philosopher Wittgenstein described the human condition as that of a fly in a bottle. The fly bangs against the sides of the bottle why? Because he does not see the bottle. The world and life are one. I am my world.” The bee crawled up the glass toward the mouth of the jar. “The bottle walls are transparent, giving the illusion of freedom.”

  “They don’t know they’re in our bottle,” said Nitnoy.

  “Are they?” said Gerhard. “Or are we in theirs?” The bee reached the lip of the jar and flew away.

  * * *

  Nitnoy saw the honey man Trask only from a distance, down the table at breakfast or meditating with a group every morning and evening. Eventually Nitnoy joined them, sitting with eyes closed and pins and needles starting in his bad leg, wondering if he was supposed to be doing something specific. A sudden voice came into his ear: a woman was crouched beside him murmuring instructions, how to find the center of his body by drawing two invisible lines. “Focus on the place where they cross,” the woman said, her voice quiet as a breath, “and then I’ll tell you what’s next.” Nitnoy labored to draw the lines and failed, aware of Trask sitting across the room with his own eyes closed.

  Sometimes at night, Nitnoy lay alone in his room, the stung places itching and painful, and felt bitter doubt. Was he deluded, a slave like the bees, lured into a hippie factory, trapped and toiling? But then he’d wake alone and safe in the quiet clean room, go out into the common area, and see through the smooth glass of the lockless doors the sun rising over the lockless gate, and think: I am choosing this. He’d go back to work.

  * * *

  After one harvest, Nitnoy collected the waste wax that was sliced from the caps of the honeycomb and put it into a pile on the table for the bees to clean.

  “I have something in mind,” Nitnoy told Gerhard, who was watching.

  When the wax was clean and ready, Nitnoy brought out what he’d made in the ceramics building the day before: a tray with a dozen hollow half-elephant depressions in it. He’d made it by pressing one of the glass elephants into a sheet of clay twelve times, then firing that. While Gerhard watched, Nitnoy set the tray into one of the rectangular containers they used to collect the honey, placed the metal filtering screen over the container’s top, and crowded the bits of waste wax onto it.

  By the afternoon, the wax had melted in the sun and dripped through the filter to fill the oiled clay mold, making a smooth block an inch and a half thick. Nitnoy moved the container into the shade, and after the wax cooled and hardened he shattered the clay and sliced the wax into smaller blocks, turned them over. Twelve cakes of beeswax, each with an elephant in relief on the top, ready for sale.

  * * *

  “Wittgenstein wanted to show the fly the way out of the bottle,” Nitnoy told Gerhard one day. “But that’s not what you want.” He felt daring, telling his teacher this. After two years at the compound, Nitnoy had read the books Gerhard had given him, plowing through the novels and the volumes of history and mathematics, reading more slowly through the philosophy tomes.

  “What do I want?” said Gerhard.

  “You want the fly to love the bottle,” said Nitnoy.

  Gerhard smiled.

  “I’m ready to tell my story,” said Nitnoy. “And I’d like to tell it to you.”

  * * *

  It took three days. They stopped only for drink; they did not eat. It was hot enough that they rarely had to pause to urinate. Others took care of the bees while Nitnoy told Gerhard everything, from as far back as he could remember, until his voice was hoarse and frayed. Gerhard listened, made no comment. When finally Nitnoy stopped speakin
g, Gerhard said, “That’s not all.”

  “That’s all I remember,” said Nitnoy.

  Gerhard waited.

  Nitnoy rolled onto his back, stared up at the graded pool of light on the ceiling thrown by the candle on the bedside table. Thinking, No, no I can’t tell this part. Thinking, I have to.

  “Khi told me.” The words stumbling into the quiet. “When she was hurting my ankle.” On the ceiling, a monstrous silhouette of an insect: blurred wings, dangling legs. “She told me that she’d tried to return me for money, but my parents wouldn’t pay.” He felt the shameful truth slip out of him. “They didn’t want me back.”

  He cried for a long time, and then slept, and when he woke, he felt lighter. Not as if the burden he carried had dissolved, but as though it had changed its nature. He remembered it all, he would always remember. Deep within him, the river still flowed, but the liquid between the banks was weightless as mercury.

  “You are free now,” said Gerhard. “You begin from here. You must live with awareness, choose your life every day. Your first decision: you can stay or you can go.”

  “I will stay.”

  Gerhard nodded. “Your second decision: you need a new name.”

  The answer came to his tongue immediately.

  * * *

  He was Pip now. He continued with meditation—every day, twice a day, trying to draw the lines without thinking about drawing the lines. Most days he spent the whole meditation period fighting urges: to scratch an itch on his arm, to open his eyes. He sat in half lotus—all he could manage with the deformed ankle—morning and evening with his eyes closed, eventually no longer trying to draw the lines but trying instead to accept that perhaps he’d never draw them.

  After four years of choosing meditation and the bees every day and reading every book that came into the compound, Pip went to sit as usual on the hard floor, and some unknown time later his eyes opened slowly as if waking from sleep, and when the rest of the group rose and dispersed, he rose too, and went to the instructor.

  “I did it,” he told her. “I drew the lines.”

  “What did you see where the lines crossed?”

  “A ball,” said Pip. It had hovered over the point of intersection, sooty clouds whirling inside it. “Full of darkness.” The instructor nodded.

  “Clear the darkness,” she said. “See what’s inside.”

  That took much longer. That took almost the rest of his life.

  * * *

  One night, Pip went to Trask’s room and lay down alongside him. Trask opened his eyes and smiled. It was nothing like Kenneth. It was man to man, it was chosen by both of them every day, it was love.

  * * *

  For the first time since he could remember, Pip could see money and feel no pull toward it. Those bits of metal had no intrinsic value; they were tokens used outside the walls, by people outside the walls. He stayed inside the walls, with the bees and the flowers. There was always someone else to send out for an errand. It might be a kind of bottle he’d crawled into, reflected Pip, or a human version of a harvest maze, easily entered but difficult to leave. But was that a bad thing? Trask, who went outside every day to sell the honey and the cakes of beeswax, described how Bangkok was changing. Pip could see the cranes on the horizon, the buildings rising. There was talk of an elevated train. Some nights Trask stayed out overnight and didn’t come back. Sometimes he brought a new person back with him, whom he took to an unoccupied room; that person stayed or didn’t stay.

  The old habits returned to Pip. He found himself counting, and evening things out. Gerhard noticed.

  “It feels—necessary,” said Pip. “I don’t know why. I’m happy here.”

  “I am not sure it has to do with happiness,” said Gerhard. “I think it has more to do with your relationship to perfection.”

  Pip considered that. Being Nitnoy had been chaotic, like living with a jangling bodyful of broken glass. No amount of ritual would have had an effect. Pip, by contrast, was happy—but oddly less content. To Pip, good implied the possibility of perfection. The constant teasing nearness of it, the impossibility of achieving it, drove him to self-soothe. Love my bottle, Pip told himself. Gradually, over a long time, the habits died away.

  * * *

  One season Trask grew drastically thinner. He was forty-one, only ten years older than Pip, but he began to look elderly. Purple spots bloomed on his skin; he sweated with fevers. He went to the doctor, came back and explained to Pip what the doctor had said. Slowly Pip understood: like a wandering bee, Trask had collected a toxin outside and brought it in with him. There was no cure. Caring for Trask through blindness and hallucinations and a long, speechless, raspy-breathed coma, Pip struggled to practice Gerhard’s principles: total presence in the moment, no looking forward or back. All we have is now. He didn’t completely succeed in stamping out either the longing for the past, for the days when Trask had been the beautiful healthy honey man, or the cringing from the future, waiting to grow sick himself.

  Enter this loss, said Gerhard after Trask died. Feel every part of it, then let it go.

  Selfish thoughts kept breaking through Pip’s meditation, I didn’t keep him safe—I let him wander, and agonized questions, When will my turn come? Standing with the bees humming around him in the sunlight, he tried to feel those feelings too, and also let them go.

  A new realization came to Pip during that period of acute mourning, as simply as a breeze passing over his skin. Without effort or struggle, with no sense of epiphany, he understood that he was not the bees’ deity but their servant. He was part of the cycle of their lives, that endless loop of industry and loss. The realization came to him in a shimmering, clear moment, and Pip was different afterward. He stopped fearing illness and death, stopped festering with regrets. He felt a deep internal balance: from then on, there was no part of that river inside him that was purely light or dark.

  * * *

  Over the years, the group alternately dwindled and grew, breathing in and out like a set of lungs. As Gerhard grew older and more frail, Pip and the others cared for him until the day he closed his eyes forever. Shortly after that Claudette came, with her sharp voice and sharp eyes. She dispatched the whole lot, the weepy Australian girl who’d been there for only a season and the glassblower who’d been there longer than Pip, and everyone in between.

  “You must have family somewhere,” Claudette said when only Pip was left.

  “I had sisters,” he said. He was surprised how easily the girls were called into his mind from that long-ago time tangled up with pain and sadness like bees caught in honey. They’d been there all along, though, for as soon as he looked, he saw them vividly: Laura jumping rope, Bea flutter-kicking across the pool. They’d be women now. If they were still alive, if they had ever existed.

  “You’re American? Canadian? Australian?” Claudette rapped out. “What’s your full name?”

  He’d been Pip for decades, but when he opened his mouth to answer, the name slid out easily: Philip Preston.

  He gave her the names and facts he remembered. He wanted to tell her not to bother looking for that clean family in 9 Soi Nine, the temple-roofed house with the hibiscus garden and the swimming pool. Trask had described to him how that whole block had been leveled and rebuilt long ago during that time of rapid evolution, when the old Bangkok was being eradicated and replaced by the new. There was no way to find the Prestons now, wherever they’d gone.

  He hadn’t reckoned with, indeed hadn’t known about, Google. Claudette poked her index finger at her phone and after only a couple of minutes, turned it so he could see.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting the small lit screen toward him. “Is this your sister?”

  2019

  Chapter Fifty-One

  HE DIDN’T tell all of it, but he told them enough, and when he was done they were hushed. Edward had come in during the narrative and sat beside Laura, putting his arm around her.

  Uncle Todd was sitting with his f
ace buried in his hands.

  “How could you,” Bea said to him. “How could you.”

  “Why did you leave him at that place?” said Laura.

  “I’ve regretted it all my life,” said Bardin, his voice muffled. He lifted his head; his eyes looked hunted. “I was on my way somewhere important when I ran across Philip in the street.” He shook his head. “A source I had been cultivating. We used to meet in a heroin room in one of the bars in Patpong. I had an agreement with the girls who prepared the syringes; they’d fill mine with sugar water. I was late to the meeting when I saw”—he looked at Philip—“you, alone.”

  “You could have taken him home on the way,” said Laura.

  “It was the opposite direction from your house. It had been months of work. The source was about to turn. I made a choice.” He looked sick with regret. “I took him—you—to the doss house I used as a cover, and went to the bar.” To Philip, “I told Min to go and get you and take you home. You’d met Min. She was one of the bar girls I trusted. I didn’t know she was angry at me.”

  “Why was she angry?” said Philip. His voice hushed and high-pitched, sounding almost like a child’s.

  “I was careless with a photograph,” he said. “She’d been trying to get her younger brother out of Vietnam, and I’d promised to try to help. But the photograph of him got into the wrong hands. The VC thought he was an informant. He was tortured and killed.”

  Whose hands? thought Laura.

  “Min blamed me,” said Bardin. “I didn’t even know yet what had happened to her brother, that night when I trusted her to give me sugar water. Instead, she gave me the full-strength drug. I didn’t wake up for two days. I almost didn’t wake up at all.”